Go ahead and dip your toes in the Big Lake, but that might be as far as you want to go for now. The water in Lake Michigan remains chilly, but after a long winter and cold spring, all the Great Lakes are ice free for the first time in seven months.

As of June 6, Lake Superior, the last fresh water frozen holdout, was clear.

“This year is the longest we’ve seen ice on Lake Superior in our 40 years of records,” George Leshkevich, physical scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a release from AccuWeather.com.

The Great Lakes hit its second highest ice coverage on record, reaching 92.19 percent on March 6.

Lake Michigan hit a record in ice cover as well. On March 8, the lake was 93.29 percent ice covered, surpassing the 1977 record of 93.1 percent.

Moving into the spring season, more 38 percent of the Great Lakes remained covered in ice in mid-April, causing major problems for the steel industry as the business relied on the waterways for shipping and transporting goods and materials, according to the report.

“There are no years in the last 30 years that are even close to that, so it’s very unusual this late in the season to have that much ice coverage,” said Paul Pastelok, AccuWeather.com lead long-range forecaster.

The last time the ice coverage on the lakes lasted nearly this long was in 2003, when the last of the ice cleared on May 29, according to Leshkevich.

That ice and the cold winter are keeping water temperatures down.

The lake temperature at Holland was 48 degrees on Thursday morning. Saugatuck was 49 degrees, according to the Michigan Sea Grant website.

At this time last year, Holland and Saugatuck were at 58 degrees, and in 2012, Saugatuck was 61 degrees, according to Michigan Sea Grant records.

In May, the Lake Michigan temperature was the lowest since 1996, the last time large sections of the lake were covered in ice.

Swimming in water below 70 degrees can induce a life-threatening health condition known as immersion hypothermia. As water takes heat away from the body almost 25 times faster than air, this condition develops much more quickly than standard hypothermia.

The cool water will have effects beyond weekend swimming.

“It's going to affect the overall atmosphere around the region,” Pastelok said. “It may be a bit on the cooler side.”

The Climate Prediction Center has all of Michigan in a below-average temperature pattern through August.

In addition to cooler weather for the Great Lakes area, slow-recovering lake temperatures could lead to less severe weather near the lakes and more widespread fog, according to AccuWeather.com.

“It’s going to be the summer of fog,” said Peter Blanken of the University of Colorado in a June report from the University of Michigan. “The water will stay really cold, but summer air tends to be warm and humid. And any time you get that combination, you're going to have condensation and fog — basically evaporation in reverse.”

Page 2 of 2 - The cooler temperatures could mean less evaporation of lake water this summer and higher lake levels in the fall, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Monthly projections show lake levels continuing the traditional increase through July and August, and possibly hitting the historical average in September or October.